


desiccator #9

by orphan_account



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-19
Updated: 2013-03-19
Packaged: 2017-12-05 19:11:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/726920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The hissing siren charge of weapons, or the whirring that creeps up behind when Jaime follows him doesn’t even really make Bart jump and panic anymore. Mostly."</p>
            </blockquote>





	desiccator #9

**Author's Note:**

> Age 'em up up up.

Okay, so this Deadshot guy is annoying, to say the least.

 

He’s got Tim pinned between two conveyor belts and a furnace shaped kind of like a fat rodeo clown that’s throwing searing heat all the way across the factory. He’s got what looks like an enormous .500 magnum trained on Tim’s face and another pointed directly at Jaime. They’re rigged up with lights and whistles and all sorts of things Bart doesn’t recognize and the way Jaime froze next to him when he saw them is not exactly reassuring.

 

“Not really into these kinds of guns,” Jaime says, carefully. His voice cracks just a bit on the last word and Bart tries to shuffle a little closer to him.

 

“One more inch, kid. Try it,” says Deadshot, and Bart stops.

 

The steel beams overhead shake, concrete dust drifting down like the smoke precipitate back home. Bart shivers. Conner is outside, bellowing wordlessly, punching his way in and M’gann is pleading with him in all of their minds to please chill _out_ he’s going to bring the building down on their _heads_. Bart has to grit his teeth and pull himself out of the conversation on the mental link, turn his attention back to the peril at hand.

 

“Where is he?” Deadshot’s saying.

 

“Look,” Tim says, trying for level and calm, not quite making it, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

 

Deadshot snorts.

 

“Selina wouldn’t even consider talking to me unless some real shit was going down. And what do you know, when I try to reach Catman to check if she’s lying, he’s not anywhere. Anywhere. So what did your big bad boss do with him?”

 

“ _Qué chucha--! He is_ not _a liability. Just because he’s human doesn’t…”_ Jaime’s muttering beside him and Bart shoves him with a quick elbow. What the _hell_ , Blue?

 

There’s a loud painful wrenching noise above, and the network of cracks in the ceiling expands.

 

Tim backs up, pressing himself against the belt, curling as far away from the heat as possible.

 

“He hasn’t done anything to Catman. None of us has.”

 

“Sure.” says Deadshot, “I don’t want to kill you, kid, but I will. If your boss touched him, insulted him, wrote him a strongly worded letter, I’m coming for you. I keep those promises. You know me.”

 

Tim sets his mouth in a long thin line, and nods.

 

“Where is the big man, anyw--” Deadshot begins, but Tim’s flipped onto his hands, shot out a leg and kicked some sharp-edged metal scrap from the conveyer belt into the furnace. Sparks fly directly into Deadshot’s face and he falters, for just a second. Enough. Bart is off, knocking the guns out of his hands and dodging up the wall as they discharge into the floor, wow is that guy fast. Tim leaps, catching Deadshot in the eye and tumbling over the moving factory parts. The ceiling shakes, and when Bart looks up, he sees Jaime holding a twisted steel beam up with his shoulders, wings going faster than almost even Bart can see.

 

“Time to go, _hermanos_ ,” Jaime says, and Bart doubles back to push Tim with him as best he can, and they squeeze out the hole Conner punched in the wall.

 

It’s all right, this Young Justice gig.

 

There’s beds, running water, so much running water. There are kids like him, who’d be locked up, hunted and experimented upon until nothing but the husk is left. But more than that. They’re teenagers. Kon, who laughs expansively and kindly when La’Gaan gripes about having to do the sheets himself for the third time this week so the housekeepers don’t see the mess he keeps making at night. Tim, who is smart enough to talk physics with and just cruel enough that you always have to reconsider his jokes to make sure they’re not about you.

 

M’gann, who knows everything about you just by looking, even before she gets all up in your brain. Gar, who’s so far from normal ( _average, Bart, not normal_ ) he’s adopted the kind of zen Bart saw in the old men and women in the work camps back home.

 

Jaime. He’s gone a lot, home in Texas, where, he says, the sun is even bigger than it is here. Bart can’t really imagine it. Jaime has a sister named Milagro and two best friends named Paco and Tye and he lives with both parents in a little house with thirteen stairs. Sometimes he says weird non sequiturs like he expects you to know what he’s talking about, to catch up with his thoughts before he says them. His hands are freakishly huge, and his fingertips flare out just the tiniest bit, like a gecko’s would.

 

The hissing siren charge of weapons, or the whirring that creeps up behind when Jaime follows him while he’s running doesn’t even really make Bart jump and panic anymore. Mostly.

 

 Jaime has a few rough patches of hair on his face. Bart’s face is smoother than water.

 

 

The first time Bart saw Jaime, he was tearing from Jay’s to the cave for breakfast. Bart almost ran straight into him in a lower level hallway and had to turn on a neutron and throw himself back behind the corner he just rounded. He pressed up against the wall and breathed for a full second, because that was _him_.

 

Jaime laughed; it sailed out.

 

“I don’t know,” he said, “but we _did_ just see someone tearing around like Roadrunner on the metanfeta.”

 

Bart peeked around the corner and Jaime cocked his head, looking at him quizzically. Jaime’s hair stuck up on one side, a spiky fringe of black. The zipper on his red hoodie was broken and it gaped in the middle. He looked like he just woke up. He looked normal.

 

“Hi,” Jaime said.

 

Bart pulled back behind the corner and breathed, quickly, three times, and then came out to meet him.

 

“Heeeeyyy there Blue!”

 

A few nights later, just because, he ran to El Paso. Miles of crazy blue desert under the moon. It was colder than he thought it would be. When he saw warm glow in the little square windows of Jaime’s house, he got a very sharp pinch in his ribs and not from running too fast for the oxygen molecules. He set himself vibrating, phasing as clandestinely as he could, and inched up to the bush under the brightest window.

 

Books and papers lay scattered across a kitchen table, and Jaime was bent over them, clutching at his head dramatically. A man, his father probably, was drying dishes and singing along to the radio in Spanish. Bart could see a corner of the living room through the kitchen, a little girl in green overalls draped backwards over the couch, watching TV upside down.

 

Jaime’s voice almost startled him out of the bush.

 

“I am going to fail. That’s it. I’m going to fail and not get into Stanford and never amount to anything.”

 

His dad laughed, tossed the towel over the handle to the oven, and sat down next to him.

 

“First of all, I don’t think you can fail the SATs.”

 

Jaime groaned, and laid his head down on folded arms.

 

“Jaime,” said his dad, “listen to me, hey?”

 

Jaime nodded, and his dad put a hand on his shoulder.

 

“I know you want this, _mijo_. And I know you can do it. We believe in you. But all of this…this is nothing.”

 

He gestured to the books and papers on the table.

 

“You will be a good man, Jaime. At Stanford, at UT, even if, _Dios no lo quiera_ , you’re stuck at the garage with me,” he said.

 

 Jaime laughed, a little reluctantly, and said, “Throw me that towel,”

 

Bart had to run, then, because an uncontrollable fizzy laugh was bubbling up and around his insides even though his eyes were kind of watering. Thunder cracked over the desert and sent up that wild warm clean smell that comes with all the rain here. He flung himself into the drops and pounded across sand and stone and the dried up bunchy-looking trees waved at him as he went.

 

***

Yeah, Bart guesses it’s okay here.

 

Sometimes he sticks his face in the grass in the Garrick’s backyard and smells the sun that’s soaked up there. Back home, when some of the girls would scrounge vitamin D tablets from horny higher-ups in the Reach-allied human cadre, Carla would always save him one. She smoked long irradiated cigarettes until her chest glowed faintly blue, and her skirts were shorter than anything Bart’s seen around here in the past. She’d comb her thin white fingers through his mat of hair while he swallowed it. Like he’s running his own through the actual green things on this earth. There are long, long stretches of green things here, and animals, and all of the small wars are stupid, people hurting each other with no comprehension of what is coming.

 

Things move fast, almost fast enough for Bart, and there’s enough to do that he can keep moving and keep talking and almost forget.

 

Bart hits puberty all at once, and completely, probably because now he has enough food for luxuries like secondary sex characteristics. He’s working with Nightwing on adding a series of acrobatics to his arsenal, trying to seamlessly fold every possible degree of movement into his speed, when it happens. La’gaan’s awkward boner stories become, like, 400% less funny. He slips, misses the parallel bar and falls flat on his face on the mat below. He looks up and Dick is hanging above him, looking concerned.

 

“You okay Impulse?”

 

His neck is stretched in a long tan line to keep Bart in view and his legs are thrown over the bar. He stretches out a hand, meaning to pull Bart up with him, but Bart won’t be having that.

 

“Yeahgreatsessiongottago! Shower!” he calls from halfway down the hall.

 

He presses his face into the cool tile of the shower stall and brings himself off frantically. Seconds later someone bangs loudly into the showers comes and when he peeks through the crack in the stall, he sees Jaime, wearing a towel, whistling maybe a little too casually.

 

“You all right in there, ese?” Jaime says, “Nightwing caught me in the hall, said you didn’t seem so good.”

 

“Fine!” Bart says, and his voice strangles on the word.

 

Jaime doesn’t seem convinced, so Bart finishes cleaning off and flies out of his stall, shoving a little at Jaime, nudging him.

 

“You know, just the old…cleanliness.”

 

Jaime laughs, clutches at his towel and hipchecks Bart right back.

 

“Fastidious is your middle name, yeah, yeah.”

 

It’s some time later that the particular spinning horror of the thought of Jaime in the showers hits Bart. Water might rush down Jaime’s skin, over that blue bug in his back, the way it does his own. He might do the very same things, might feel it too. Bart’s face burns, and he tries not to think about it.

 

It wouldn’t _technically_ be a problem that Bart’s body betraying him became, like, a daily occurrence, but it always did seem to spring up at the worst possible time, with the most people around, or in the middle of the night, or while he’s running to do some hero stuff. There’s an off-step careening in his body and he can’t afford that right now, not when there’s still so much he has to find out, and prevent.

 

 

It hurts a lot, when they take him, when they shut him up in those pods that he was never supposed to get near again, not since he found more effective ways of hiding his particular talent than keeping his mouth shut and trying to move slow. It hurts more that he failed, and that Blue is about to go dark side, and that he blew up the mountain where all his friends lived and maybe even killed some of them.

 

When rescue comes, he speeds off without waiting for directions and gets Jaime’s bare arm over his shoulders, half dragging his weak frame through the bleak alien halls. Jaime’s voice is a rasp. He’s staring into middle distance and clearly in pain, but he’s trying. His gecko fingers are wrapped around Bart’s shoulder, pressing in painfully, and Bart doesn’t think he can lie to him anymore. So he doesn’t.

 

They are not alone, in the end. Jaime’s easy lope has disappeared and there is a distinct pinchiness around his eyes these days, but he's teaching Bart to skateboard, and triumphing when he wins at all those terrible slow videogames, and in the makeshift cave in Blüdhaven, Bart lies on his bunk and hears breathing all around him.  It’s nothing like the camps and nothing like the cold solitary whirr of the time machine while he and the Doctor took turns sleeping and working, and Bart thinks this might be just enough hope. Just.


End file.
